13 x 10” perfect-bound book printed on archival paper
80 pp.; with 40 full-color images
ISBN 978-0-9899117-6-4
Since the incorporation of the Esopus Foundation Ltd. in 2003, we have asked contemporary artists to create limited editions that we offer in exchange for donations. Revenue from these artworks allows us to continue our mission of providing an unmediated, accessible forum for artists and the general public.
These limited editions are not for sale; therefore, a portion of their value is tax-deductible per the Internal Revenue Code. Donors will receive an email receipt for their records.
Other People’s Prescriptions is the Esopus Foundation Ltd’s first volume published under the “Esopus Books” imprint, and the first monograph of work by the New York City–based artist Neil Goldberg. The 80-page, 13-x-10" book, which includes an introduction by Pulitzer Prize–winning author Louis Menand, was launched at an event at Artbook @ MoMA PS1 on Sunday, April 28th. During the event, Goldberg discussed the book and his artistic practice with Trick Mirror author Jia Tolentino.
Over the past 25 years, Neil Goldberg has created a remarkable series of artworks that incorporate photography, video, installation, mixed media, and performance to explore embodiment, sensing, mortality, and the everyday. New York—in particular, the rituals, gestures, and accoutrements of its inhabitants—has always played a major role in his work, and the city appears prominently in Other People’s Prescriptions. This perfect-bound book comprises 40 color images from Goldberg’s recent photographic series of the same name, featuring bespectacled New Yorkers photographed from behind to afford viewers a glimpse of the city through their corrective lenses.
In his incisive introduction, Louis Menand walks us through Goldberg’s hall of mirrors: “These people are not seeing the world, we think; they’re seeing what looks to us like a distorted, compressed, miniaturized rendition of the world . . . . In Goldberg’s series, this thought—we change perceptions with prescriptions—is given another twist. His subjects are looking through lenses, but he is looking at his subjects through a lens—the camera lens. Looking at the photographs, we are seeing the image created by a lens on lenses. And what are we looking with? Another lens. Eyeballs are the eyeglasses that evolution has given us.”
Other People’s Prescriptions employs the congenial voyeurism that informs so much of Goldberg’s practice. Whether his (often unwitting) subjects are perusing the contents of a bodega’s salad bar, emerging from a subway, carrying groceries, or checking an email on their iPhone, Goldberg manages, through his trademark combination of conceptual rigor and deep empathy, to celebrate their humanity while inspiring us to recognize our own.
New York-based artist Neil Goldberg has exhibited at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, the New Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Wexner Center for the Arts, among others. Goldberg has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the New York State Council on the Arts, and the Experimental Television Center. Goldberg’s work was the subject of a widely acclaimed exhibition, Neil Goldberg: Stories the City Tells Itself, at the Museum of the City of New York in 2011. Since 2013, he has taught at the Yale School of Art and been a visiting artist at Cooper Union, the School of Visual Arts, Parsons/The New School NYU, the MIT Media Lab, Princeton University, Washington University, UC Berkeley, UCLA, and RISD.
